Europe’s need for a sustainable and equitable investment plan

 

The Covid-19 crisis puts a double challenge to Europe and the world:

  1. We need smarter solutions for our health, elderly care, education, travel, leisure, manufacturing and of course our planet and climate, and;
  2. We also need to save and renew millions of jobs and enterprises as the base of our prosperity while the digital transformation of our societies fast-forwarded.

In the next weeks, our leaders will decide on the European Union (EU) future budgets in good part to address this double challenge.

An informal group of independent experts worked in the past few months gathering information and looking at actionable EU policy options considering Europe’s structural challenges but also the historic opportunities and global societal trends.

It published an Open Paper and a Presentation which can be downloaded below.

In summary, the Group recommends investing with equity in growth enterprises by pooling independent investment of capital at EU level.

Its key recommendations are:

  1. Public funding is most opportune to invest in our future, not to fix our past
  2. Smaller innovative growth enterprises will create and grow most of the future jobs and societal innovation that we now need across Europe and the world
  3. These enterprises need mostly equity or risk-bearing finance and not loans
  4. Independent investors across Europe can provide such equity investments and their funding can be scaled up with bottom-up EU-level market conformity
  5. The EU and national public funding can do that in a pooled partnership approach opening and levelling-up the Invest EU programme to better impact
  6. Public budgets could expect in a pooled EU level open partnership approach to deliver attractive returns and impact for future generations
  7. A pooled EU approach fosters a savings, investment and capital markets union [while investing or planning nationally reversely fragments the European market even more]

 

16 June 2020

 

Signed

  • Christian Motzfeldt – Chair of the Informal Group
  • Alexander Banz, Alisee de Tonnac, Stefano Firpo, Sarah Fisher, Cristina Fonseca, Eeva Grannenfelt, Hermann Hauser, Petri Laine, Florian Lahnstein, Maxime Lingjaerde, Daniel Kubitza, Erika Mann, James Mawson, Kostadin Kostadinov, Julia Prats, Maurice van Tilburg, Jean-Emmanuel Vernay - Members of the Group
  • William Stevens - Facilitator and Editor of the Group

Get an e-mail to download the Open Paper and Presentation by entering your e-mail here:

 

Download here

 

We welcome your feedback and suggestions. For further information, please e-mail William Stevens at william@techtour.com